One of the
gulfs between the colonial experience and our own is that we can turn night
into day at the flick of a switch. It is something we take so much for granted
we barely give it a thought. Unless it fails. Colonial Williamsburg guests seem
to spend little time pondering this—though nearly all register delight when
entering a candlelit building at night. That experience seems to many like a
romantic vision of the past come alive. Others react to the aesthetics of it
more keenly than when they have seen the same building by day.

Something of the same contrast marks visitors' responses to
the elegant objects fashioned in the past to hold the candles. Finely displayed
as they are, important lighting devices in the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts
Museum seem not to arouse much admiration unless they are pointed out and their
virtues explained.

They were
statements of social position.

Compared to earlier times, huge numbers of objects were made
in the eighteenth century to light interiors and add grace to them by their
felicity of design. Far more of them have survived than earlier ones. In
addition, candles became more affordable, wax and whale oil, or spermaceti,
types being cleaner and longer burning than the earlier tallow. To the
ever-increasing number of eighteenth-century consumers it must have seemed that
impenetrable darkness was at last retreating before the forces of modern life.
Candlesticks, candelabra, chandeliers, and lanterns proliferated, fashioned
from expensive materials like silver or silver-gilt, from novel substances like
porcelain or colored stone, or from brass, pewter, or tin.

These devices ranged from the simplest, such as oil lamps,
to the socially spectacular. The latter were meant to attract attention, and
they did, with comments like "magnificent," "luminous," or "splendid." In their
number, material, newest fashion, or lavishness, they were statements of social
position or ambition.

The pattern for this was set, as in much else, by Louis XIV,
particularly in his Galerie des Glaces at Versailles. Built between 1678 and
1680, this Hall of Mirrors was the largest of a suite of three galleries,
lighted by dozens of massive silver chandeliers and candelabra. Hundreds of
candles reflected and re-reflected in the mirrored walls, creating an effect
that appeared, to many who witnessed it, "stupendous." They understood that
this was also what they were meant to think of the man who'd commissioned the
objects—the king of light. But candles lasted only a few hours, and the
elaborate silver devices lasted only ten years before they were melted down to
pay for the king's wars. Hall and monarch lasted longer.

In the following decade his arch-rival, William of Orange,
recently become King William III of England, ordered similarly grand silver
chandeliers, though in a less profligate manner. Five were listed in a 1721
inventory, some of which may have dated from the reign of his successor, Queen
Anne. Two of the five are known today, one hanging at Hampton Court Palace,
near London, for which it was made. The other was created for St. James's
Palace in London. This is now at Colonial Williamsburg. It is something no
other museum or collector can claim.

Splendid and rare as it is, the chandelier hung in the Governor's
Palace at Colonial Williamsburg for almost thirty years before its identity was
discovered. When it was disassembled and examined in the mid-1960s the marks of
goldsmith Daniel Garnier were found in the form he is known to have used from
1691 to 1697. This proved that the piece was fashioned in London and was
clearly one of the chandeliers recorded in the royal collections a few years
later.

William III commissioned the piece from a recent refugee
from Louis's repressions of religious dissent. A Protestant, Garnier was one of
many so-called Huguenots who fled to England after their rights were revoked in
1685. These immigrants included highly skilled craftsmen, conversant with the
latest French styles that then led all Europe. Through his patronage of Garnier
and other compatriots, which unsettled the native-born English tradesmen,
William made a political statement.

For his new sovereign, Garnier created a highly refined
object. In style it shows the classical development of the late baroque in France,
which quickly spread to Holland and England. In size it is imposing—more than
two feet tall and three feet in its spread, weighing 721 ounces of silver, in
addition to the iron core that holds it together.

Another piece in the Colonial Williamsburg collections, a gift of the Harry
Coon family, this silver-gilt candelabrum belonged to the Duke of Cumberland,
George III's youngest son. Three feet high, it displays winged sphinxes,
reflecting the taste for "Egyptian" style of the early nineteenth century.

Ten "nozzells" and elegant arms spring out from the complex
baluster shaft. The arms are shaped into a curve and reverse curve, or
cabriole, form—a basic element of the baroque—and the shaft is boldly
articulated with expanding and contrasting rhythms, and further defined with
gadrooned bands of different widths. The same gadrooning appears on nozzles and
arms. Light from each candle reflected in pinpoints on the hundreds of
individual gadroons, and more broadly on the plain surfaces. The total effect
is brilliant.

Louis XIV's chandeliers went to the melting pot, and
Garnier's masterpiece nearly did too, though not for another hundred years. In
1808, when the Prince of Wales separated from his wife, a number of large
silver items from the royal collections were de-accessioned and sent to the
royal goldsmiths, Rundell, Bridge, and Rundell, to be turned into a cash
settlement for the princess. The goldsmiths seem not to have been quite precise
in the way they carried out their orders. They quietly sold the items to some
of their best clients.

The chandelier reappeared in public view in 1924 at a
Christie's auction in London of Sneyd family heirlooms. It had graced the
family's Staffordshire estate, Keele Hall, for decades. The top bidder was the
American magnate and obsessive collector, William Randolph Hearst. It was on
the market again in New York fourteen years later, when John D. Rockefeller Jr.
bought it for Colonial Williamsburg. It soon adorned the newly reconstructed
Governor's Palace, where it was seen by millions during the next forty years.

At the time
the ailing and exasperated George III was trying to come to terms with the
profligate ways of his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, his youngest son,
Ernest Augustus, was indulging in some conspicuous consumerism of his own.
Colonial Williamsburg owns an item from his buying spree of 1806—a majestic
silver-gilt candelabrum in the latest fashion. It bears the royal arms for this
son, the Duke of Cumberland, and was one of a larger set, perhaps four or six,
perhaps twelve or more.

This new fashion was the Egyptian style. Piranesi, the
Italian designer-draughtsman, was influential in its introduction into European
culture during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. By the 1790s it was
the rage. In the first years of the new century the really affluent developed a
taste for examples of massive display plate in this style, especially from the
royal goldsmiths. They commissioned most of these pieces from the firm of Digby
Scott and Benjamin Smith, whose mark is on this royal candelabrum, with the date
letter for 1805-6.

Roman elements—sometimes of the kind discovered by
archaeologists in Egypt, sometimes made up—figure among more obvious Egyptian
motifs like winged sphinxes, but the overall effect is clearly more exotic than
classical Roman designs. Even with this yard-tall object, the impression is one
of complex detail and richness. Deeply sculptured lion's feet and masks,
eagle's wings, human feet and masks, anthemions, acanthus, gadrooning—all are
of differing scale, yet all are coordinated and harmonious.

With so much ornate, gilt surface, the reflected candlelight
from the six branches and the central nozzle is dazzling. Imagine the effect of
a row of them on all the silver and gold cutlery, the china, and the glass laid
out on a huge dinner table.

A perfect
illustration of the Georgian "Rule of Taste"

Emblem
of the Wallace Museum, these silver candlesticks were made by Paul de Lamerie
in mid-eighteenth-century London. The classical symmetry and simplicity of form
reject the ornateness and complexity of the baroque and rococo.

Smaller in
size but equally impressive in quality is a set of four candlesticks made by
the renowned silversmith Paul de Lamerie in London in the mid-1740s. While
columnar candlesticks appear in the late seventeenth century, and proliferate
in the later eighteenth century, this set, we believe, is unparalleled. What
sets it apart is when it was made and how.

In contrast to the taste of the 1740s and '50s—the rococo,
which we associate with the designs of the cabinetmaker Chippendale and with de
Lamerie's own ornate work—the craftsman fashioned these sticks in a refined
classical style. The purchaser, Kenrick Clayton of Marden Park, Surrey,
probably had something to do with their form, though that is not proven. His
and his wife's coats of arms are engraved on each piece, but nothing more is
known of them.

Each fluted column is slender and fine, and the Ionic
capital neatly detailed. The fully delineated entablature above is
extraordinary. Complete and architecturally correct, in miniature, it is this
feature combined with the broad stepped base that makes the candlesticks so
distinctive, and indeed masterful. The emphasis on classical antiquity, in the
midst of the anti-classical rococo, and on the foundation of classical
correctness and harmony—namely, the column, its base, its few variant capitals,
and its entablature—makes the set a perfect illustration of the Georgian "Rule
of Taste."

This was a philosophy as much as an aesthetic. It was
underpinned by a broad knowledge of the classical world, including its
architecture. And it depended on understanding how the measurements and
proportions made that architecture, in the opinion of the time, the most
perfect expression of man's creativity. It guided, perhaps dominated, the
Augustan Age, and provided the constant background against which the baroque
and rococo styles were relatively minor expressions.

Chippendale's great pattern book, The Director, now considered the touchstone of
the rococo in England, features the classical orders as its first
illustrations. The author said that without fully understanding the orders, and
the ability to draw them, craftsmen would never create designs of worth or
validity, nor get them on paper convincingly enough to explain them to others,
including prospective patrons.

It is doubtful if king, duke, or knight considered their
lighting devices works of art. Their definition was narrower, focusing on
ancient art, architecture, and old master paintings, not on the furniture and
household wares that seem so splendid to us now. Each would have been mindful,
though, that they represented a sizable investment, even melted down. Each, I
believe, appreciated the virtuosity that went into the fashioning of them, and
understood how they represented a superior attitude towards social position,
tone, and fashion.

For us, with our broader definitions of what constitutes a
work of art, each of these items is a singular expression of a period and a
style, a visual lesson in protean magic of form and rich sparkle of surface,
and an experience in perceiving beauty of line and detail and color.

Graham
Hood, Colonial Williamsburg's vice president for collections and museums and
Carlisle H. Humelsine Curator until his retirement in December 1997, writes
from his home beside the Chesapeake Bay. He contributed to the summer 2004
journal an article on the Tompion clock.